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Longer hours, more stress: The new reality in the Canadian workplace

Brian Bebek puts in 55 to 60 hours a week at his job with a Burnaby engineering firm and is accompanied by his dog, Skye, during his long work days. ‘He gets mad if I don’t take him with me and he lets me know it,’ says Bebek. Arlen Redekop/PNG

Photograph by: Arlen Redekop
, PROVINCE

Brian Bebek is lucky he loves his job because he’ll likely spend much more time doing it this year.

The materials inspector employed by a Burnaby engineering firm worked an average of 55 to 60 hours a week in 2013.

He expects these hours to increase in 2014 as activity ramps up at the large Vancouver building projects where he monitors structural and material quality.

As he drives his pickup from site to site, Bebek is accompanied by Skye, his miniature Australian Shepherd.

Bebek, 39, is nominally the one who gets paid for the job. But two-year-old Skye appears to believe Bebek can’t handle the long days unless he comes along.

“He gets mad if I don’t take him with me and he lets me know it,” Bebek says.

Bebek sometimes feels as if he’s “the only person who spent their professional life running a marathon with no sign of the finish line in sight.”

But he and Skye won’t be the only B.C. residents to work like dogs this year. Workplace experts predict Canadians will spend more time on the job as workloads mount, people remain nervous about their jobs and employers increasingly expect employees to answer emails and texts at any time of day.

WORKING LONGER AND HARDER

Welcome to 2014, a year in which many of us, from employees to business owners, will work longer and harder than ever.

When 2013 ended, almost 70 per cent of North Americans had not taken all of their vacation time, says Right Management, which ­advises companies around the world on workforce issues.

A separate survey by Expedia.ca found that 52 per cent of B.C. residents have cancelled vacations because of work, making them the most likely group of Canadians to do so.

Right Management spokeswoman Margaret-Ann Cole predicts that the big chunk of North Americans who abandon vacation time in 2014 will remain the same.

During the 2008 recession, when companies were laying off large numbers of people, fearful employees felt they had to be tied to their desks, Cole says.

“It became a habit in which fewer and fewer people take vacations. Social media makes it really hard for those who do to turn off and cleanly go on vacation,” Cole says.

“People are working longer. They may not be physically in the office but they are taking work home. If you did a poll and asked people, they would answer ‘yes,’ they are working longer.”

Overall family work hours have been on the rise, according to StatsCan. The combined weekly work hours of Canadian couples jumped to 64.8 in 2008 from 57.6 in 1976 — the equivalent of almost another full day of work per week, the federal agency says.

Still, overworked Canadians with good jobs may wish to count their blessings. Carleton University business professor Linda Duxbury says Canada’s workforce is splintering into three groups: knowledge workers (professionals and managers who work long hours); lower-end service-sector workers who cobble together several part-time jobs; and jobless people displaced by automation or outsourcing, unable to find any work for which they’re qualified.

The upper and lower ends of the pay spectrum are both working longer, Duxbury says. At the low end, workers stitch different jobs together to make ends meet.

“My data says one in five Canadians has more than one job,” she says. “That tends to be people with lower pay who need every available hour to survive.”

People at the upper end of the pay scale are not only working longer, they’re working harder as employers’ demands become more complex, Duxbury says.

Employers want workers to be available throughout the day and night. Work increasingly leaks into family time, forcing parents to “outsource” family responsibilities. They pay for child care, buy meals instead of cook them and send kids to camp rather than take vacations as a family, she says.

GREATER DEMANDS

Work is intensifying as employees are expected to constantly upgrade their skills, whether or not the company trains them, Duxbury says. And they are being overloaded with difficult tasks.

“We’re being expected to do too many things at the same time,” she says.

“I hear all the time from people that tell their employers, ‘You asked me to do A, B and C and all are due tomorrow. Which do you want me to do first?’

“The answer is: ‘I want you to do all of them.’ ”

Employers’ inability to set priorities and boundaries for employees carries a cost for organizations and individuals, Duxbury and other experts warn.

“It can also be something as simple as people being more moody, more edgy, not using the social niceties at work. That can lead to more conflict and that, in turn, has impacts on productivity and absenteeism.”

Christian Codrington, a senior manager with the B.C. Human Resources Management Association, suggests that many people have become obsessed with work — and obsessed with appearing to work hard by emailing late in the day or in the wee hours of the morning.

Both of these obsessions blur the borders between work and family life, hurting personal and organizational well-being, he says.

“Since the inception of the service in 2009, there has been a consistent increase in the average absence from 5.8 days a year to 7.1 days in 2013,” Codrington says. “We estimate that for every day lost it costs employers an average of $371/day in direct labour and benefit costs.”

WORK CONSUMES LIFE

Robert (his name has been changed to protect his privacy), a mid-level tourism industry worker in Vancouver, says work has consumed his life. In the busy spring and summer season, he works 60 to 90 hours a week. Even a brief vacation is out of the question.

His employer has begun to track his email activity to make sure he remains logged in during his “off” hours.

“I’ve more or less reached my breaking point,” the 40-year-old says. “I’m worn out. You don’t have time to see friends or family. You don’t have time to find a new job.”

Are those of us lucky to be working doomed to become more like Robert? Will working hours get longer and longer, reaching deeper into what’s left of our personal lives?

Duxbury believes that things will get better. Government, rather than bringing in temporary foreign workers, can help jobless and overworked Canadians by re-skilling people — equipping them with the credentials employers need.

There’s an enormous opportunity and no time to waste. In five years, the higher-income end of Canada’s job market will be short about 800,000 skilled people, Duxbury says. Meanwhile, there’s expected to be a surplus of 500,000 people on the unskilled end.

As baby boomers leave the workforce in greater numbers in five to 10 years, skilled employees will become harder to find.

Generation Y, the folks born between 1977 and 1994, will make work-life balance a priority. That will leave Gen Ys in a better position to negotiate limits on hours of work, she says.

“We’re just at the beginning of some pretty transformative changes in the workplace,” she says. “We’ll see the time at work decline for highly skilled people, but we’re in a transition period now.

“The transition can be pretty ugly until baby boomers exit the workforce in bigger numbers.”

SMALL BUSINESS OWNERS UNDER PRESSURE.

Growing competition is driving small-business owners like Craig Yee to work longer hours.

Yee, who employs three people at Vancouver-based OHS Global Risk Solutions, says he tries to outpace the competition by quickly responding to any client who has health and safety concerns.

“The competition in our [health and safety] line of work is higher than ever before,” Yee says. “More often than not, my staff and I work 10 to 12 hours a day, five to seven days a week. Which, of course, means less vacation time for us and our families.”

On the other hand, Yee tries to give his staff enough flexibility in their schedules to counter the long hours.

Laura Jones, an executive vice-president with the Canadian Federation of Independent Business, says competition and red tape are tied for the No. 1 reason that Canadian business owners are working long hours.

Part of the competition comes from former employees who start their own businesses after being laid off, Jones says.

Sixty-two per cent of business owners have coped with the 2008 recession and its aftermath by increasing their hours, CFIB research shows. Twenty per cent have reported working more than 60 hours a week.

Most small business owners don’t mind the hours, Jones says. A 2011 survey by CFIB showed 63 per cent of business owners enjoy their work.

In a recent survey commissioned by Regus Canada, Angus Reid found that small business owners and entrepreneurs are the most likely Canadians to take emails, make calls and attend to work while on holiday.

The hours can become too much for some business people.

Work and wellness expert Beverly Beuermann-King says many people start businesses out of a desire to control their own schedules.

When they find themselves working more hours than they did at their jobs, they may lose heart.

“A lot of small-business owners end up going back to working for someone else because they burned themselves out. They didn’t pace themselves,” Beuermann-King says.

Brian Bebek puts in 55 to 60 hours a week at his job with a Burnaby engineering firm and is accompanied by his dog, Skye, during his long work days. ‘He gets mad if I don’t take him with me and he lets me know it,’ says Bebek. Arlen Redekop/PNG

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